austinchang

i agree with you here but sounds like you are mostly talking about "Early Adopters"?

Power users of a product who get deep recurring value from your product are get to analyze. they may be mostly earlier adopters at first but hopefully will grow to be your core customer.

sure. happy to chat. ping me at austin [@] initialized [.] com

thanks for the comment. agree that chasing after the "wrong" customers is a whole pitfall unto it's own. Nothing here says you need to chose your user based on existing top of funnel. Often times those are earlier adopters who try something and leave.

When thinking about your products critical user journey you need to think about ideal cases: who is the User, what is their Goal and in what Context they are using your product. Lots of work goes into understanding each of these to hone in on specifics for each product and definitely much more detail than this first article.

completely agree. most "Critical User Journey" articles are written by UX or product designers.

this article was meant to be an introduction to show how any product, startup, or company can use User Journeys as a framework for product development (not just product design) and how if executed in a systematic way can unblock growth.

thanks andrew. glad that you thought it was valuable.

you summed it up quite well. it is very easy to lose sight of what your users go through for the first time every day when you are the one adding to the system to extend or expand it.

Sorry everyone for the sudden notice. This has been wrecking us for some time and we went back and forth about how to handle this timeframe. Having a long graceful transition period for our users would have been great but for reasons that we could not control Fridge as it currently stands had to be shut down quickly. Unfortunately there are tough decisions (especially in startups) to make and tougher consequences to live with even if they come with a silver lining at the end.

We remain dedicated to building great products and hopefully things will become more clear after the dust settles.

Again, sorry for the sudden notice...

Company name: Fridge (YC s10)

Company size: 5

Company URL: http://www.frid.ge

Position: Web Development, Sever-side development

Contact email: intern@frid.ge

Skills needed: PHP, MySQL and/or CSS/XHTML, jQuery

yeah! great job guys... keep it up

thanks for the tips! we are in the middle of updating our "getting started" flow which isn't as optimized as it should be.

this and a full featured native experience is coming in the next few weeks!

Public groups or events on FB could work but they suffer two things:

- people not invited, not involved, or random people start to get messages about the event and it becomes noise and adds to the clutter. Interactions around specific and esoteric groups, events or interests in a public forum isn't really the best way to spur real conversations.

- be yourself: post, message, comment, heart what you want in the confines of that topic, event, group. Fridge takes permissions and privacy around access to profiles, pictures out of the picture and lets you post and share what you want with exactly the right people

it all comes down to social context and not having a one size fit all hierarchy of relationships.

Here is the direct Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt493X2IPCc

Fridge lets you connect with friends, family, strangers you just met, co-workers, soon to be acquaintances, etc... around specific events, relationships, or groups.

Don't have to add anyone as friends or worry about privacy or permissions. Clustered social graphs mimic how you meet and interact with your real life network.

Some of these may work on FB but many topical, time and event based relationships would not work within the FB friend request structure.

Learning simple logic gates in LOGO making the turtle go around a path... do kids still do that today or is it much fancier?

things starting/stopping - groups, interests, friends is actually a good thing and what keeps things interesting.

things coming and going should be a feature not a flaw of the way people interact online...

Yeah… we completely agree. The idea of a "personal network" is definitely right but the real problem is that not everyone fits the same mold of "friends". much less a subset of 50 people? do you give your cousin the cliff over your coworker of 5 years for that 50th spot?

The notion of "clustered social graphs" where you can share and update what you want/when you want and ignore/archive/or leave when you are done is more accurate on how people interact.

The Frid.ge has been contemplating how this maps out as a mobile experience and sharing what you want when you want with who you want. How is that limited to just a one group of people all the time?

The idea of a personal network is a good one but the problem is that there isn't just 1 personal network but clusters of networks. how do you address the different type of interaction in a limited network of only 50?

definitely... in the middle of a large rewrite to address server side things as well as front facing speed/usability issues.

after the dust settles and we get the fridge humming we should be able to have some meaningful data...

not sure the fridge is "another" social network but rather clusters of networks where people follow interests rather than other people... eh, semantics i guess but feeds into how we are growing the product.

not quite. (and definitely welcome the discussion)

all Fridges will always be accessible to only those in the group. if you aren't in the group you don't have access to it. we are already seeing users create Fridges for larger and more "open" groups like conferences, events, interest groups, etc... and the members are the ones that share the invite URLs to add members.

the main point here is that members of one group do NOT have any information or access about the others groups you are in unless you share it. the group members of a Fridge can decide how open or closed they want their group to be.

in the future an administrator can customize group settings to enable a group to be "listed" or "discoverable" allowing organizations or events that want to open to be open. it would definitely be transparent to the members and settings ONLY for that group with their other groups closed, private, and not listed...

the social graph we are building are around specific context, relationships, events, and interests that you actually care about versus linear connections that linger in a 1 to 1 friend based social graph. single Fridges might be single serving and temporal but as more are created the relationships that are built/formed/carried on to others are what is valuable.

monetization is definitely in the works with a few things cooking and not necessarily from freemium offerings only.

while the right acquisition is fine and dandy we are trying to build something that has legs...

thanks! working on a faster/less janky version to be released anyday...

at the moment we only "link" groups when there are common users in both. we are finding that as more and more groups are formed (around interests, events, organizations) more and more overlap occurs.

while this isn't terribly valuable right we might introduce the concept of larger contextual groups that are open to invites that we can start suggesting for related context

argh... sorry about that! we had a bug we introduced recently that we thought fixed that... email repairman@frid.ge with you account and we can fix it?

The Fridge was a late applicant in the S2010 round. we missed the normal deadline and submitted a few weeks before the late deadline. we also revised and updated our applications almost up to the day we were emailed we got an interview...

actually it wasn't ever broken. while we are revamping our architecture the urls/params are exposed however you can only see profiles of people who are in your group (which you can do on the site directly by clicking on their names)

We restrict all access and indexing of groups to only group members. While bots or curious folks can systematically change uid numbers they won't be able to access anything in a group unless they are already members...

not a privacy bug but exposed uids which we are soon fixing

yes! but for now we are focusing on personal and private relationships. user and interest based discovery is something we are definitely going to add in...

those are your group setting options. in the group itself you can post, upload photos, parse youtube/vimeo video urls, post flash embeds, and more to a very specific group of people. create multiple of these side by side to have personal conversations with different people and events...

definitely rough around the edges. a bit more polished site coming imminently...

Thanks! New release was supposed to hit before the Xconomy article came out but should be up later today/tonight/late tonight...

very simple for now but lots of stuff cooking...

Yes. we are currently developing our API that will support customization of groups as well as the ability to take your Fridge groups with you with an iphone app being one of the first uses.

To what standard we integrate with we aren't sure yet. We know it won't be FB connect...!

i agree completely and group platforms is one market we are trying to address in that Fridge groups are super easy to create, invite friends, and share/socialize.

one thing we are rolling out soon is gmail and google group contact import.

This is a great post and great suggestions!

1. doh. get one up asap (little launch things we overlooked thanks!)

2. we are working on a bit more custom notification settings. right now they default to post ON but you can always turn them off for specific group. you get notifications if someone comments on your post as well as if you have commented on something and there is follow up. the idea of subscribing to a post is great. on the list!

3. yes, we have a new photo upload interface coming out soon. know that it is not ideal!

4. youtube (and vimeo) native URLs are supported if you don't add any text. if you do it is just the video (like FB actually) however we do let use the embed code to post videos inline and add comments before or after. works for any video service as well as any flash embed.

5. see 3. but yes. coming soon!

6. absolutely. we are working on the whole photo experience one step at a time.

7. well for the dedicated email addresses for each group you have to be a Member of each group in order to post to that group. we check the sender email with the group members so people who aren't members but just try to spam all the groups won't be able to.

Thanks! We are working on rolling out a much easier to use and "polished" design that keeps the simplicity but fixes alot of these UI issues.

As you continue to use it would love any feedback, comments, or concerns. cheers!